Nationwide research is firming up the case for “intelligent” compaction (IC), a construction method three decades in the making that could save billions of dollars a year in potholed roads, cracked bridges, broken dams and blown-out tires. But as it represents a huge cultural shift in project delivery, the industry is struggling to find a standard way to roll it out.
With today’s busted public budgets, IC is a promising tool with global implications. “I’ve studied where we spend money in the U.S. to fix our infrastructure, and a lot of the cost can be tied directly to the performance of compacted materials underneath our civil infrastructure,” says David White, a professor at Iowa State University, Ames, and director of the school’s Earthworks Engineering Research Center. White underscored his point at an Intelligent Construction for Earthworks conference of about 100 public and private engineers, held on April 14-16 in West Des Moines, Iowa.